Tory blueprint for new leader and 50,000 recruits

The Conservative leadership plans to boost party membership by more than 50,000 even as it strips them of the right to elect their leader.

The Tories' proposed constitutional blueprint, published yesterday, confirmed plans to scrap the current one-member one-vote system of electing the national leader and return the decisive say to MPs.

The consultative document dismisses the existing leadership system, introduced in 1998, as a failure which must now be rectified. "The one-member, one-vote principle was intended to encourage a return to a much wider, mass membership. It has not done so nor do we think it is likely to succeed in that aim," says the document, supposedly written by the voluntary wing of the party, led by Raymond Monbiot, the chairman of the Tories' national convention.

As predicted, MPs will nominate a shortlist of leadership contenders and pick the eventual leader in an old-fashioned secret ballot.

In the first stage, those with nominations from more than 10 per cent of colleagues at Westminster will go on to a shortlist which will go before a vote of the national convention, which currently represents the party's voluntary activists but will be expanded to include many paid politicians, including sitting MPs and Euro-MPs as well as some local councillors.

The convention's vote will be non-binding and indicative, save only that the convention's preferred candidate must be in every round of the final MPs' ballot.

But in that final vote at Westminster, MPs will be free to pick anyone from the original shortlist. If, at the first nomination stage, a candidate is backed by more than 50 per cent of MPs, he or she would "automatically be declared leader". The document reaffirms its belief that the Tories must still be a mass voluntary organisation, even in these days of computer technology and sophisticated targeting of marginal seats.

Francis Maude, the new party chairman, writes in a foreword that a mass voluntary organisation is not redundant as an idea, "neither will it be sufficient for us to organise only in the marginal seats that we need in order to form a government".

The blueprint sets the ambitious target of boosting membership from just fewer than 300,000 now to 350,000 by the end of 2006. The document paints a grim picture of the narrow base of current party members and who they seek to recruit. "Members tend to target people like them - their friends and neighbours. The result is that most of our members come from a narrow section of society," it says.

A similarly weak picture emerges of many of the 640 or so Tory constituency associations, with 198 having fewer than 100 members. Some reputedly have no members at all.

The document proposes merging these into stronger groups with the ability to employ a qualified agent and to revitalise campaigning.